Luke Kanies was talking with me about implementing rdoc2man and
rdocusage. I thought RDoc::usage would be a very cool thing to have, so
I stole the idea and implemented it while waiting at the doctors' this
morning.
Basically, if the main program file in your application has an RDoc
comment describing the program, you can use it to generate a usage
message for your users by calling
RDoc::usage( )
If you just want to display the Synopsis section (which in the RDoc
will have a heading "= Synopsis"), you'd instead say
RDoc::usage('synopsis')
To display the author and copyright sections, you'd say
RDoc::usage('author', 'copyright')
It honors the RI environment variable, so it will display using ANSI
escape sequences or backspaces if that's what the end user has asked
for. It'll also generate the usage message in HTML.
There's a page on the wiki describing it:
http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RDocUsage
Forgive the slightly ugly HTML example at the end: the wiki seems to be
touching about some HTML tags in its input.
RDoc::usage in the head of 1.9 and 1.8 CVS right now.
Cheers
Dave